GEOLOGY 
Marl. The aggregate thickness of the Upper New Red (Trias), in 
Cumberland, exceeds 3,000 feet. 
The present author, taking into account the full extent of the un- 
conformity at the base of the New Red, and adding to it the time im- 
plied by that needed for the formation of the marine types of the rocks 
of the same age deposited elsewhere, has estimated their time value at 
132,000,000 years. 
Forms of Life associated with the New Red.—Attention has been 
specially called to the evidence of a period of enormous length which 
_intervened between the close of Carboniferous times and the com- 
mencement of the conditions under which the New Red was formed. 
Little wonder, when the length of this interval is taken into considera- 
tion, that vast and important changes had been gradually brought about 
in the meantime. In general terms, these were the extinction of most of 
the older forms of life which characterized the foregoing period, and the 
evidence of which ancient forms of life in these rocks led geologists to 
refer to the groups as the Paleozoic group. Now that we know more 
about these matters it is found desirable to subdivide the rocks in ques- 
tion, and to refer to all, from the lowest Skiddaw Slate to the highest 
Silurians, as the Proterozoic Group, and all the remainder, to the base of 
the New Red, as the Deuterozoic. With the advent of the New Red 
we find evidences of a commencement of the present order of beings, 
whence the name Neozoic, first used by Edward Forbes, is now often 
applied to all the rocks newer than the Carboniferous. 
Regarding the Cumberland New Red, almost the only traces of 
animal life are simply the footprints of a great variety of air-breathing 
vertebrates, which waded in the shallows of the old lake, or wandered 
amongst the desert sandhills. Evidence obtained outside of Cumberland 
assures us of the fact that a large proportion of these animals were 
reptilian, although amphibia may well have been present too. In the 
Penrith Sandstone, as already mentioned, the old desert sandhills, now 
hardened into stone, frequently show the spoors of the old kangaroo-like 
reptiles of this period. A very interesting set of them was collected some 
years ago by Mr. Geo. V. Smith, F.G.S., and his brother and sister, from 
quarries near Edenhall. Other similar remains occur now and then on 
slabs of the St. Bees Sandstone, from which rock, near Dumfries, the late 
Sir William Jardine collected a fine series, which were figured in The 
Ichnology of Annandale, and are now in the Edinburgh Museum of Science 
and Art. 
The vegetation of the New Red makes a nearer approach to that of 
Australia than to existing European types at the present day, and is 
distinctly of a much higher grade than the flora of the Carboniferous 
Period. 
(/) A remarkable and well-known sheet or sill of dolerite, the 
Whin Sill, traverses the Carboniferous Rocks in the district immediately 
to the north-east of the Pennine Fault. It formed the subject of an 
important paper by Mr. Clough, of the Geological Survey, in which 
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